Still Around
by Anna Taure
Summary: While working at the SGC, Malek's host notices a model in a lab that triggers a lot of old memories from another life. Stargate/Murdoch Mysteries cross-over


A/N : just a little thing born of watching too many series with the same actors during the same week; this one stubbornly refused to leave until I wrote it down. I value my sleep, so I complied.

My apologies if some mistakes are still around; English is not my native language, but I'm doing my best to avoid grammatical horrors. Errors, I mean.

Well, here it is. Good reading to you all...

Summary: While working at the SGC, Malek's host notices a model in a lab that triggers a lot of old memories from another life.

1st person POV

_host-symbiot dialogue_

* * *

><p><strong>Still Around<strong>

1)

I can feel Malek doing the equivalent of a yawn at the back of my head. We have been working on the tretonin cure for nearly three days in a row, and it is time to leave our experiments and get some sleep.

Malek did most of the research, though I can provide some help; biology was never my forte. Before we met, I was an architect with a knack for models and science-fiction à la Herbert Wells. Malek finds my memories of that time highly entertaining. I would rather forget them completely.

# #

We are now stumbling rather than walking through the corridors of the base; at least, living underground is not an issue. Tok'ra spend most of their spare time in a similar, though less bleak, environment. It is a trifle too grey for my taste in there. Once I had dreamt of building cities where men could live in complete autarky, but I would have never created them so... colourless. True, we are in a military base, but soldiers' brains work the same way as any other human's. I understand why some of them become claustrophobic here.

" 'evening, guys... a sleepy voice mutters on our right."

I turn to find Lt Hailey on the doorstep of her own laboratory. I have heard that, since she joined the SGC, she barely took a day off. She is known to be a genius, "Einstein reincarnated in a short, blond, foul-tempered girl", to quote Dr McKay. She is one of the very few people who seem unaffected by the whole symbiotic process. "Package deal", she would say, and share a cup of coffee.

"- Malek, I have to tell you, you really look awful. Well, your host, that is. I'll tell those slave-drivers of the high command to give you some time off."

"- Malek is currently asleep, lieutenant. Thanks for the offer."

She is blushing now. She does this a lot around us. I know it is perfectly genuine, so I cannot help being touched by this naive behaviour.

"Did you eat something? I still have some Chinese soup, if you like."

I do. I was a bit wary at first when someone offered me Chinese food, as I had tasted what the Asiatic workers ate on the railways building sites, more than a century ago, but there had been a certain improvement while I was away from Earth.

"I would like that very much."

Soon we are seating at her desk. The soup is still warm, and I suspect that Hailey added some spices of her own before serving. Malek is so deep in slumber that he does not even comment on the food. I take a look at the room, trying to find something more personal than the stack of books and files resting on a chair, and my eyes fall on a model put on display on a shelf.

It represents the solar system with its planets. Only eight; when the model was made, Pluto was not classified as a planet yet. It was only some kind of blurry spot on the telescopes.

Hailey must have noticed a change on my face. She puts down her spoon and looks at me.

"- Is there a problem?"

"- Where did you find this model?" I ask, pointing to the tiny planets.

She grins and stands up to pick it.

"- Cute little thing, eh? My grand-father gave me this solar system for my tenth birthday. He got it from his own grand-father. I think it got me addicted to science, in a way."

"- Who was this man?"

"- The first scientist of the family", she says proudly. "He was a policeman first, but he quitted and became a lab assistant. His name was George Crabtree."

I just cannot resist. I laugh. I do not know who said that the world was a very small place, but he or she was most definitively right.

"What's so funny?" she asks.

Then she narrows her eyes and studies me the same way she would study one of her equations.

"- You know this model."

"- I made this model, miss Hailey."

She blinks once, twice. She is completely bewildered. Then a giggle escapes her lips and she looks at last like the child she still is, from my point of view. A delightful child, to be honest. The kind of person who could share my "little hobbies" as I called them, a lifetime ago.

"- When?"

"- In 1893, if I am not mistaken."

_No, you are not_, Malek whispers in the back of my mind.

He must have been awake for a while, I realize.

_Indeed. Life is really funny._

After that he just closes the connection and I am on my own again. Hailey is now firing questions in quick succession.

"- When were you born?"

"- 21st of April, in 1858."

"- Where?"

"- Newcastle."

She whistles.

"- You an Englishman, then? I couldn't place your accent."

"- I emigrated to Canada, I admit."

"- And how on Earth did you manage to end up as a Tok'ra?"

I will not tell the whole story. It still hurts, the way an old scar pulls and twists the flesh around it. But a quick summary should satisfy her, for now. Maybe later, I will tell her the rest... If we are both alive and sane.

"- Let's say some misfortune forced me to leave the country and find a new employer, I say. I was known as quite the inventor, so when Dr Tesla offered..."

"- WHAT? You MET Tesla?"

"- In fact, I worked with him."

She refrains from hugging me, but barely. It is known that Tok'ra are not very fond of unexpected physical contact.

"Well, it's official now. You're my hero."

I take some more soup before going on.

"- Once we were notified of some unknown magnetic phenomena in Sweden. Tesla was in the middle of a series of conferences, so I went in his stead. Can you guess what I found?"

"- Well... Due to the location, I'd say you met some Asgards checking on their humans."

"- Indeed. Heimdall considered me the opportunity of the decade, at least. She was pleased to find a human being with "a curious mind and a proper brain". I was introduced to the Tok'ra two years later."

She nods. She seems impressed, though honestly I cannot understand why. Before I discovered the existence of aliens I had been a complete wreck. I had lost everything: the firm I had created, my fortune, my so-called friends, my wife... I confess that Malek spent a lot of time repairing my liver, due to my excessive love of the bottle, and my lungs, damaged by too many nights sleeping in the streets.

Worst, I had lost the ability to trust unconditionally. I was afraid of being close to anyone. Malek excepted, Hailey is the first being I let come that close. Sometimes I still feel like a waste of space.

_I happen to disagree_, Malek comments. _And I am sure that Lieutenant Hailey thinks like me. Be __happy, for once._

# #_  
><em>

2)

Five years later...

I still have troubles believing it, but Malek and myself are alive, and paired together. We managed to survive the last steps of the fight against the Goa'ulds, and the Orii invasion. My former fellow Earthlings are now aware of the existence of aliens, and they took the news with remarkable calm and composure. I dare say some of them are even delighted.

The revelation changed many things for the SGC. For instance, all the alien residents are now allowed to leave the complex and visit Earth with minimal security rules.

This explains that I am now standing in a graveyard in Toronto, sitting on a stone and having a one-sided chat with the man resting under it. A man I had last seen more than a century ago.

# #

When I came back to Earth some months ago, I did some research. I was suddenly curious to know what had happened to the people I had encountered in my previous life. Nothing really surprised me. Dr Odgen had left for an hospital in Buffalo, married an colleague and adopted three children. She had died in 1938 surrounded by a whole tribe of grand-children, I read. Crabtree had married Odgen's younger sister Ruby, and I have become quite familiar with the latest offspring of this family.

Then there is Sally. The last time I met my former wife, she was trying to sell one of Tesla's inventions to the Turks... and to send me to the scaffold, by the way. When this attempt failed, she decided to give up robbery to focus on revenge, and murder. She was caught two years after our last meeting, but not before she killed one of the policemen involved.

And now I know who the unfortunate man was.

_William Murdoch_

_1856 - 1898_

I am surprised to find he was older than me. He was acting so foolishly sometimes that I was convinced to be the eldest of us two. And I am also sorely disappointed that he let his guard down while facing Sally, though he knew what kind of evil she could brew. I am sure that many Goa'ulds would have been delighted to have this woman as a host.

"Well, I suppose, if you are still around, that you must be surprised to see me sitting on your grave. And you will be more surprised to know that I don't intend to spit on it. In fact, I came here to thank you. Yes, thank you for your obfuscating stupidity, and for falling head over heels for my witch of a wife. If you had not, I would have died as James Pendrick, most certainly back-stabbed by sweet Sally. Now, my name has been forgotten save by some friends, I have known the darkest pits of Hell... but I am still alive, with more responsibilities than you can imagine... oh, and a woman who shares my "little hobbies". Who makes a living from them, in fact. We are in 2011 and my world has never seemed brighter."

I raise from the cold stone and leave. I have nothing more to tell Murdoch now, whether his ghost is listening or not.

Hailey is waiting for me at the graveyard gate. We are openly living together now, and she thinks that Jenny Pendrick has a lovely ring to it.

So do I.


End file.
